This post is dedicated to Michael :)
I did a quick hack which allows sysops to ban logged-in users. This was
discussed on wikien-l long, long ago, and was widely agreed to be a good
idea (well, not that widely, but Jimbo was particularly keen). Basically you
just type the username into the ban IP box. I changed a few messages to
indicate that you could do it.
Blocking a logged-in user by IP address was slightly trickier (but still
only required a handful of lines). Whenever any banned user successfully
logs on and accesses a page, their IP address is automatically blocked. The
reason given is 'Autoblocked because you share an IP address with "Michael".
Reason: blah blah blah', and the "blocked by" field is copied. That way the
"you are banned discuss this with xxxx" message still makes sense. As usual,
these automatically generated entries, and the original username entries,
can be unblocked by any sysop (even blocked sysops).
I know Michael has been making a nuisance of himself again, so I'm sure a
lot of people will be interested in seeing this go live quickly.
I also fixed that annoying undeletion problem (mostly). It still doesn't
update the search index, or user_newtalk, or site_stats, or probably a few
other things. But at least the link table is fixed up.
-- Tim Starling
Michael Becker wrote:
>So the new and improved notice will read: "All content is
>available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation
>License. See Wikipedia:Copyrights for suggested practices."
There is one problem with this; it is a lie. Wikipedia has many photos that
are used under "fair use" or "non-commercial use" doctrines.
-- mav
Hi,
I've got an Google Adwords coupon free of charge with a
web server I ordered. I don't need this coupon for my
server so I thought about donating it to wikipedia.
It's a 50 Euro coupon and if we create an add using
the keyword "encyclopedia" google estimates it to
cost 12 Euros per day when paying only the minimal
Cost-per-Click rate of 5 cent. This would mean it's
a 4 days campaign.
Any thoughts?
Regards,
JeLuF
I've added a more convenient link into the undeletion system, which will
show in bold at the top of the page when viewing a page which has been
deleted (if you're a sysop).
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
These are kinda needed for enhanced recentchanges to make sense:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 apache wikidev 289 Jan 6 2003 Arr_d.png
-rwxr-xr-x 1 apache wikidev 918 Jan 7 2003 Arr_.png
-rwxr-xr-x 1 apache wikidev 282 Jan 6 2003 Arr_r.png
a) Who made them?
b) Are they GPL-compatible?
c) If a) and b) are satisfactory, any objection to adding them to CVS?
(They have to be marked as binary files in some way if so. I don't know
the option offhand.)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
OK. My Wikiholism is advancing to the next level and
to feed that I would like to consolidate MediaWiki's
documentation on meta. The reasons are two-fold; 1)
there are already forks in documentation development
between meta, SourceForge, Lee's webpages, and various
Wikipedia namespace pages (not to mention other
duplication; such as in other Wikimedia projects) 2) I
would like to understand the beast known as MediaWiki
so that after I learn PHP I can advance to
uber-Wikiholic and port over the WikiBook
functionality from PyWiki and tweak it for use in
Wikibooks.
I don't want to step on anybody's toes, so I would
like to know who is currently involved with creating
documentation? Is there anybody working on
coordinating documentation efforts? If so, then I
could work with that person instead of leading this
effort on my own. It would also be helpful to know
where current documentation resides.
Currently on meta:
MediaWiki
How to become a MediaWiki hacker
Running MediaWiki on Windows
Database queries on MediaWiki
Text in MediaWiki
MediaWiki math markup
RDF spool
Wiki markup tables -- proposals
Wiki markup syntax - see Wikipedia DTD
meta.wikipedia.org technical issues
Sites using MediaWiki
Wikitax
On en.wikipedia:
Wikipedia:MediaWiki
Wikipedia:Software Phase III
Wikipedia:TeX markup
Wikipedia:Software Phase IV
Wikipedia:TeX markup
Wikipedia:GNU LilyPond support
Wikipedia:Edit summary
Whole bunch of how to use Wikipedia's software pages
(this will take some time since many of them have
Wikipedia-specific references).
I'm thinking about organizing all this between actual
documentation vs ideas about how MediaWiki should
work. Documentation can be further subdivided between
stuff for developers vs stuff for users. When we do
finally have the WikiBook functionality, then an
actual users guide and developer documentation guides
can be organized on meta (complete with a "print this
book" feature).
This is a long term undertaking but I think it is
worth the effort.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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I've just committed some code to CVS which allows internationalisation of
"magic words" (my term) such as #REDIRECT, __NOTOC__, {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}},
etc. I've done it so that each word can have a number of synonyms. I expect
we will implement it so that the english words work everywhere: this
eliminates conversion cost, avoids annoying people by forcing them to change
their habits, and makes it easier for people to contribute to many different
language wikis. We can add localised versions as soon as someone from that
wiki translates it. Some languages may want more than one localised synonym,
for example with and without accents.
In Language.php, there is a new global variable $wgMagicWordsEn, and an
accessor function which can be overridden on a language-by-language basis.
The variable is an array of arrays, where the first element of each row
indicates whether or not the word is case sensitive, and the rest of the
elements are synonyms.
This data is loaded into a MagicWord object on demand, using the syntax:
$mw =& MagicWord::get( MAG_REDIRECT )
That's right folks, in a Wikipedia first I've actually used constants! And
references! For convenience, there is a $wgMwRedir variable, where the
get( MAG_REDIRECT) has been done for you in Setup.php. The MagicWord object
has lots of handy searching and replacing functions, which means that you
only very rarely have to deal with actual regular expressions.
According to the PHP manual strstr is much faster than preg_match for
equivalent tasks, but I did a quick benchmark and found them to be pretty
much the same (at least in the large-string limit). So I used regular
expressions all the time.
-- Tim Starling
Kat's message to the list about running MediaWiki on Windows got held for
moderation on account of "message has implicit destination". After rooting
around in the docs, this appears to be because the message was posted
through the GMANE news gateway, and thus doesn't have a To: or CC: header
pointing to the actual address of the mailing list.
This is presumably intended to protect against spam.
Any thoughts on whether we should turn this check off, or can GMANE be
configured so that the messages turn out right? Is anyone else posting to
the lists through GMANE and having or not having trouble?
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
For a while now, at least in English wikipedia, ordinary users have been able to change the text that appears at the top of Special:Recentchanges, by simply editing Wikipedia:Recentchanges. This has been great. However, there are about a million other places where such a system would be useful. For example, why can't we change the message that comes up when a new user creates an account, to something a bit more informative? Why can't we edit the text at the top of the "confirm deletion" page, to reflect this week's deletion policy?
The problem with this is that the current way of doing it is difficult to implement in each case, and not very easy to use with the other-language wikis, or the other sites using our software. I have made a simple change to wfMsg (now in CVS), which makes the creation of these software message pages much easier. With the new feature, instead of this:
"welcomecreation" => "<h2>Welcome, $1!</h2><p>Your account has been created.
Don't forget to personalize your wikipedia preferences.",
we write this:
"welcomecreation" => ":Wikipedia:Welcome, newcomers",
A message starting with a colon ":" indicates that the text should come from a wiki page. If the page doesn't exist, it will fail quietly, returning a link to the non-existent page.
In some cases the code will have to be altered to use wiki-markup messages rather than HTML, but there are a number of places where this could be implemented by simply changing Language.php.
An additional feature is that if the tag "__START__" exists in the text, the text before that point will be filtered out, in wfMsg. This allows us to write messages such as "The following text appears at the top of [[Special:Recentchanges]]. Editing this page will instantly change that text. "
-- Tim Starling <t-starling-physics-unimelb-edu-au>
MediaWiki will work on Windows with latest components:
Apache 2.0.47
PHP 4.3.3
Mysql 4.0.14-nt
PHP does not handle the include_once directive properly on all windows
platforms and
filesystems, probably due to the Windows treatment of upper and lower case
in file
names. You may have to comment out the include_onces in some of the .php
files as
follows:
Article.php: # include_once( "CacheManager.php" );
Setup.php: # include_once( "$IP/Title.php" );
SpecialMovepage.php: #include_once( "LinksUpdate.php" );
Also, you really do need iconv for some of the special pages to work, unless
you
comment out the relevant call in language.php:
# return iconv( "UTF-8", $wgInputEncoding, $s );
Procedures and issues
1. Install mysql from www.mysql.com using the windows binaries
2. Install the Apache web server from www.apache.org using the latest 2.x
binaries
3. Modify the httpd.conf for apache:
a. Add these lines at the end of the block of LoadModule lines:
LoadModule php4_module c:/playpen/php/php-4.3.3-Win32/sapi/php4apache2.dll
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
b. Change the DocumentRoot
c. Add the PHP types and disable PHP for all directories other than the wiki
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .php4 .phtml
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps
php_admin_flag engine off
<Directory "c:/playpen/wiki/runtime/wiki">
php_admin_flag engine on
</Directory>
d. It is not strictly necessary to enable the rewrite engine or include the
ampersand patch
4. Install PHP from www.php.net using the latest windows binaries
a. Modify php.ini so that register_globals = On
5. If you do not already have a CVS client, you will have to get one and
install it.
6. Get MediaWiki from the CVS archives, read readme.txt and follow
instructions in INSTALL for modifying LocalSettings and AdminSettings;
disregard the PHP/Apache/MySQL configuration notes as they are not relevant
for Windows
7. Modify php files as noted above.
8. Uncompress and load the database.
9. Have fun.
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